Erlendur sat quietly watching his daughter and wondered whether it meant anything, talking to her when she did not seem to hear a word he uttered. He thought back to what the doctor said and even felt a hint of relief, talking to his daughter this way. He had seldom been able to talk to her calmly and at ease. The tension between them had coloured their entire relationship and they had not often had the chance to sit down for a quiet conversation.
But they were hardly talking together. Erlendur smiled wryly. He was talking and she was not listening.
In that respect, nothing had changed between them.
Maybe this was not what she wanted to hear. The discovery of the skeleton, the Gasworks, the comet and the orgy. Maybe she wanted him to talk about something completely different. Himself. Them.
He stood up, bent down and kissed her on the forehead and left the room. Engrossed in his thoughts, instead of turning right down the corridor and out of the ward, without noticing it he went in the opposite direction, into intensive care, past dimly lit rooms where other patients lay, their lives in the balance, connected to all the latest equipment. He only snapped out of his trance at the end of the corridor. He was about to turn round when a small woman came out of the innermost room and bumped straight into him.
“Excuse me,” she said in a slightly squeaky voice.
“No, excuse me,” he said in a fluster, looking all around. “I didn’t mean to come this way. I was leaving the ward.”
“I was called here,” the little woman said. She had very thin hair and was plump with a huge bosom just barely contained by a violet T-shirt, and she was round with a friendly face. Erlendur noticed a wisp of dark moustache over her upper lip. A glance into the room she had emerged from revealed an elderly man lying under a sheet, his face thin and pallid. On a chair beside his bed sat a woman draped in a luxurious fur coat, dabbing a handkerchief to her nose with a gloved hand.
“There are still some people who believe in mediums,” the woman said in a low voice, as if to herself.
“Excuse me, I didn’t quite catch…”
“I was asked to come here,” she said, gently leading Erlendur away from the room. “He’s dying. They can’t do a thing. His wife is with him. She asked me to find out if I could make contact with him. He’s in a coma and they say nothing can be done, but he refuses to die. Like he doesn’t want to go. She asked me to help, but I couldn’t detect him.”
“Detect him?” Erlendur said.
“In the afterlife.”
“The after… are you a medium?”
“She doesn’t understand that he’s dying. He went out a few days ago and the next thing she knew the police called to tell her about a car crash on the West Road. He was heading for Borgarfjordur. A lorry swerved into his path. They say there’s no hope of saving him. Brain-dead.”
She looked up at Erlendur, who stared blankly back.
“She’s my friend.”
Erlendur had no idea what she was talking about or why she was telling him all this in the dimly lit corridor, whispering conspiratorially. He said a rather curt farewell to this woman whom he had never seen before, and was about to walk away when she grabbed his arm.
“Wait,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Wait.”
“Excuse me, but this is none of my busi…”
“There’s a boy out there,” the little woman said.
Erlendur did not hear properly what she said.
“There’s a little boy in the blizzard,” she went on.
Erlendur looked at her in astonishment and jerked his arm away from her as if he had been stabbed.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“Do you know who it is?” the woman asked, looking up at Erlendur.
“I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re going on about,” Erlendur snapped, turned round and strode down the corridor towards the exit sign.
“You have nothing to fear,” she called after him. “He accepts it. He’s reconciled to what happened. It was nobody’s fault.”
Erlendur stopped in his tracks, turned slowly round and stared at the little woman at the other end of the corridor. Her persistence was beyond his comprehension.
“Who is that boy?” she asked. “Why is he with you?”
“There is no boy,” Erlendur snorted. “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know you from Adam and I have no idea what boy you’re talking about. Leave me alone!” he shouted.
Then he spun round and stormed out of the ward.
“Leave me alone,” he hissed through clenched teeth.
18
Edward Hunter had been an officer with the American wartime forces in Iceland, one of the few members of the military who did not leave when peace was restored. Jim, the secretary at the British embassy, had located him without any great difficulty through the American embassy. He was looking for members of the British and American occupying forces, but according to the Home Office in London, few were still alive. Most of the British troops who went to Iceland lost their lives in combat in North Africa and Italy or on the western front, in the invasion of Normandy in 1944. Only a few Americans stationed in Iceland subsequently went into battle; most stayed for the duration of the war. Several remained behind, married Icelandic women and eventually became Icelandic nationals. One of them was Edward Hunter.
Erlendur received a call from Jim early in the morning.
“I talked to the American embassy and they directed me to this man Hunter. I talked to him myself to save you the bother. I hope that was in order.”
“Thank you,” Erlendur said.
“He lives in Kopavogur.”
“Has he been there since the war?”
“Unfortunately I don’t know that.”
“But he still lives here, in other words, this Hunter,” Erlendur said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
He had not slept well that night, he dozed and had bad dreams. The words of the little thin-haired woman at the hospital the previous evening were preying on his mind. He had no faith in mediums acting as go-betweens for the afterlife, and he did not believe that they could see what was hidden to others. On the contrary, he dismissed them as frauds, every one of them: clever at winkling information out of people and reading body language to establish details about the individual in question, which in half the cases might fit and in the other half might be plain wrong — simple probability. Erlendur scoffed at the subject as bloody nonsense when it had arisen at the office once, to Elinborg’s great chagrin. She believed in mediums and life after death, and for some reason she expected him to be open to such ideas. Possibly because he was from the countryside. That turned out to be a huge misunderstanding. He was certainly not open to the supernatural. Yet there was something about the woman at the hospital and what she said that Erlendur could not stop thinking about, and it had disturbed his sleep.
“Yes, he still lives here now,” Jim said, with profuse apologies for having woken Erlendur; he thought all Icelanders got up early. He did so himself, the endless spring daylight showed him no mercy.
“Hang on, so he’s married to an Icelander?”
“I’ve spoken to him,” Jim said again in his English accent as if he had not heard the question. “He’s expecting your call. Colonel Hunter served for a while with the military police in Reykjavik and he remembers an incident in the depot on the hill that he’s prepared to tell you about.”
“What incident?” Erlendur asked.
“He’ll tell you about it. And I’ll go on trying to dig up something about soldiers who died or went missing here. You ought to ask Colonel Hunter about that too.”